Adobe Creative Cloud Design Tools All-in-One For Dummies (2013)

Book V

Acrobat XI

Find helpful keyboard shortcuts you can use to save time while working in Acrobat XI at www.dummies.com/extras/adobecreativeclouddesigntoolsaio.

Contents at a Glance

Chapter 1: Discovering Essential Acrobat Information

Chapter 2: Creating PDF Files

Chapter 3: Adding Interactivity to PDF Files

Chapter 4: Editing and Extracting Text and Graphics

Chapter 5: Using Commenting and Annotation Tools

Chapter 6: Securing Your PDF Files

Chapter 1: Discovering Essential Acrobat Information

In This Chapter

Discovering Acrobat and PDF files

Understanding when to use PDF files

Becoming familiar with the Acrobat workspace and tools

Adobe Acrobat XI provides a variety of tools for sharing and reviewing documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF). Adobe Creative Cloud applications can create PDF files, and you can also use Acrobat to create PDF files from programs that aren’t part of the Creative Cloud, such as Microsoft Word. After you create a PDF file, you can use Acrobat to enhance it by adding interactivity, merging it with several related documents into a single PDF, adding comments or annotations, or applying security features that restrict document functions, such as printing, editing, or even opening the PDF file itself.

In this chapter, you find out why you may want to create PDF files and acquaint yourself with the Adobe Acrobat tools and workspace. You see how easy it is to navigate through PDF files with the navigational tools, tabs, and viewing options in Acrobat. In the following chapters of this minibook, you explore how to use Acrobat to create PDF files from documents produced in a variety of programs and discover ways to enhance your PDF files with Acrobat.

Working with PDF Files

With Adobe Acrobat, you can create, review, and modify PDF files. Because PDF is a common file format, you can use it to share Creative Cloud files for review, approval, or final publication, even with users who don’t have access to Creative Cloud programs. When you use a program in the Creative Cloud, such as Illustrator or InDesign, to create a document, others would need the same software to open or edit the original program files. By converting your documents to PDF, they can easily be shared with others who might not have the same software as you. PDF files can be viewed by users on virtually all types of computers, tablets, mobile phones, and operating systems.

PDF provides a common file format for viewing files, regardless of what software program was used to create them. Additionally, Acrobat provides extensive tools for reviewing, commenting, and marking files so that you can easily collaborate on a project without modifying the original document, along with tools to make PDF files interactive, merge related documents together, and secure files to restrict viewing or editing.

Because the software to view PDF files is free, you can be assured that those receiving your files don’t need to purchase any special software. In fact, the odds are quite good that most users already have some type of free PDF viewing software, such as Adobe Reader, on their smartphone, tablet, or computer.

PDF has become a popular way to share files because it provides a true reproduction of an original document, which can be important for forms, financial documents, brochures, catalogs, and other items sent to a printing vendor. Many businesses also use PDF documents because the electronic documents can be secured, and they accurately represent documents that have been approved for distribution. Even scanned documents can be saved in the PDF format and secured using Acrobat. Graphic artists even use PDF files to send books, such as the one you’re reading now, to the printing plant.

Although PDF files provide a high-quality representation of an original file, they’re more than just a picture of a document. PDF files retain the high-quality appearance of text while keeping the text searchable. Logos and illustrations created with Adobe Illustrator retain a high-quality appearance when converted to PDF, and intricate details from bitmap images, such as those edited with Adobe Photoshop, can also be maintained. PDF files enable you to distribute a high-fidelity electronic document. When creating a PDF file, you can choose settings that make the file suitable for high-quality printing or make the file smaller and more suitable for posting to a website or sharing as an e-mail attachment. PDF documents can also be used to create enhanced electronic documents and portfolios. Acrobat lets you combine multiple PDF files together into a single portfolio for sharing.

Although Acrobat is part of the Creative Cloud, it’s not a design tool — rather, it’s a tool for distributing documents created in other software programs and enhancing these documents for online distribution. You generally don’t use Acrobat to build new documents. Acrobat is a medium for sharing files, not for creating or designing documents. With Acrobat, you can

Share documents with users who don’t have the same software or fonts that you use.

Review and mark PDF files that others send you. With Adobe Acrobat, you can enable a PDF file to be reviewed by users with the free Adobe Reader software.

Combine documents created in other programs. You can use Acrobat to merge PDF files together into one document, even files that may have been originally created in different programs.

Create a PDF portfolio. You can combine various file formats into a single PDF package and yet retain the files in their original file formats.

Edit Adobe PDF files to make minor changes to text or graphics.

Apply security to PDF files when you don’t want them changed or you want to restrict viewing to certain individuals.

Add interactivity to PDF files by enhancing them with sounds, movies, animations, and buttons.

So when does it make sense to use Adobe PDF files? Here are some examples:

When you want to review a document quickly and efficiently: When documents need to be reviewed or approved, Acrobat really shines. The reviewers don’t need to have the Creative Cloud software — or whatever you used to create the document. They need only a program to view PDF files, such as the free Adobe Reader or the Apple Preview application. Recipients can then use commenting, markup, and annotation tools to add suggestions and edits to a file. You can even combine comments from multiple reviewers into a single document and manage the review process online or via e-mail.

When you’ve created a document that you don’t want others to edit: Your recipients may have the same software you used to build the document, but you can keep them from editing the original file by distributing it as a PDF file. Whether you want to secure a spreadsheet from editing or an InDesign document from modification, Acrobat includes security options that allow you to protect your original content.

When you’ve created a presentation that includes files from different programs: By converting the documents to PDF, you can combine them into a single file. For example, you can merge PowerPoint, Excel, and InDesign files into a single PDF document. Whether you need to protect your brand and identity by keeping documents from being edited or simply want to ease the process of sharing files, PDF makes it easy to share your ideas.

When you have a sensitive document: If you have a document containing information that you don’t want unauthorized persons viewing or you don’t want printed, you can enhance the file with security with the Adobe Acrobat security tools. With the security options, you can require users to enter a password to view the file, or you can limit other features, such as the capability to print or edit the document.

Introducing the Adobe Acrobat Workspace and Tools

To take advantage of all that Acrobat has to offer, take some time to discover the workspace and tools so you can get around within a PDF file. Acrobat opens with a blank workspace, and most tools and capabilities aren’t available until you open a document. If you already have a PDF file you want to open, you can open the document by clicking the folder icon with the green arrow in the upper-left corner of the Document window or choosing File⇒Open.

You can also open recently viewed PDF files right from the Acrobat Start screen, which also makes it easy to create a new PDF document or combine PDF files into a single file. (See Figure 1-1.)

Figure 1-1: Use the Acrobat Start screen to open recent files or create new PDF documents.

When you open a document, you see the Acrobat workspace, which is divided into three areas. The largest portion of the workspace is the Document window, which displays the document you have opened. Across the top, the tools are stored in the toolbar well. Along the left side of the window, you find the navigation panels that help you find your way through the document. When you open a PDF document with Acrobat, you can use the toolbars and buttons in the toolbar well to navigate a file, and you can use the navigation panel to move through a PDF file. For example, a PDF file may contain multiple pages. You can use the navigational buttons or the Pages panel to move among pages and then use a tool to manipulate the file, such as the commenting tools.

In the upper-right corner of the toolbar well, you can access additional tools, commenting and review features, and sharing capabilities. Clicking any of these buttons causes the additional tools to be displayed along the right side of the Document window. (See Figure 1-2.)

Figure 1-2: Access additional Acrobat features by clicking the Tools button in the upper-right corner.

In the toolbar well, you find useful information for navigating through your document, including

Current page and total pages: To move to a specific page, click in the area showing the current page, type a different page number, and press Enter (Windows) or Return (Mac).

Previous Page and Next Page buttons: Use these navigational buttons to skip forward or backward one page at a time.

Toolbars

The toolbars in Acrobat XI are customizable, so you can display different toolbars or change the location of existing toolbars to meet your needs.

Less than half the toolbars and Quick Tools are visible in the default Acrobat display. You can add more tools to the toolbar well along the top of the Document window by positioning your cursor over the toolbar well and then right-clicking (Windows) or Ctrl+clicking (Mac) to display a list of available tools. For example, to add the Marquee Zoom tool to the toolbar well, right-click (Windows) or Ctrl+click (Mac) and then choose Select & Zoom⇒Marquee Zoom to add this tool to the toolbar well.

Toolbars contain both tools for working on parts of your document and Quick Tools for performing actions which generally impact the entire document. Quick Tools were called buttons in previous versions of Acrobat. Quick Tools perform an immediate task, such as printing, saving, or applying security to a PDF document. In general, most of the task buttons are on the top row of the toolbar well, immediately below the menu bar, and most of the tools are on the bottom row — but you can move these toolbars.

To add Quick Tools to the toolbar, follow these steps:

1. Right-click (Windows) or Ctrl+click (Mac) inside the Quick Tools Toolbar and select Edit Current Tool Set from the contextual menu that appears.

The Edit Tool Set- Default Tools window appears.

2. Select from the available choices on the left side of the Document window and click the up arrow to add the function to the Quick Tools Toolbar on the top of the window.

3. Once you have customized the toolbar well you can save your changes by clicking Save in the lower-right corner of the window.

After you’ve saved the Quick Tools Toolbar, you can create a custom Tools Pane by following these steps:

1. Click the Customize button on the right side of the Quick Tools toolbar and select Create New Tool Set.

4. Add the tools for your Custom Tools Pane by selecting them from the Choose the Tools to Add column on the left and then clicking the arrow icon pointing to the Tools in Custom Tools Pane column on the right. (You can also double-click on a tool to add it to the right column as well.)

5. Edit your selections, if necessary, using the editing tools located at the right of the Tools in Custom Tools pane. (See Figure 1-4.) Press Save and name your toolset when you are finished.

As you can see in Figure 1-4 you can create one set, in this case a set named “Set for Print Publishing,” and then add multiple panels with tools.

Figure 1-4: Create custom toolsets.

You can also add Quick Tools by clicking the Quick Tools button in the toolbar well. This button looks like a Gear icon. (Refer to Figure 1-4.)

To access additional tools and commands, right+click (Windows) or Ctrl+Click (Mac OS) in the Quick Keys Toolbar; then choose the category of the tool you’d like to use.

Changing page magnification

Sometimes you want to see the entire page of a document; other times, you may only need to read the text or examine a small portion of a page. Acrobat provides several preset viewing options to help you with this, and you can also customize the magnification to zoom in on the page.

If things are a bit too small for you to see clearly, increase the magnification used for viewing pages with the Zoom drop-down list on the toolbar. Preset magnification choices are available in this drop-down list. In the drop-down list, you can also select options to fit the page in the window by choosing the Zoom to Page Level option from the magnification drop-down list. Use the additional choices to fit the width of the page within the Document window or to view the document at its actual size. You can also use the minus (–) and plus (+) symbols to the left of the current magnification level to decrease or increase the zoom level.

In the preceding section, Toolbars, you discover how to add the Marquee Zoom tool to the toolbar. You can use this tool to identify specific portions of a page that you want to magnify. Select this tool and then click and drag around a portion of the page to increase the magnification. You can also click multiple times on an area with this tool to increase the page magnification, but clicking and dragging a box with the Marquee Zoom tool is generally a much faster way to focus on a portion of a page you want to view.

Viewing modes

Acrobat provides several viewing modes that control how the document is displayed. For example, you can choose to display the pages of a book or magazine side by side, or view only one page at a time. You can choose which viewing mode is used by choosing View⇒Page Display and selecting the viewing option you want.

The viewing modes are

Single Page View: This mode displays only the current document page onscreen and doesn’t show any adjoining pages. When you scroll to the top or bottom of the current page, other pages aren’t visible at the same time as the current page.

Enable Scrolling: With this mode, you can see the current document page, and if you scroll to the top (or bottom) of the current page, the adjoining page is also visible. If you reduce your page viewing magnification, many document pages are visible.

Two-Page View: Use this mode to see pages as a spread, where you can view both the left and right sides of adjoining pages at the same time. When you have documents with pictures or text that spans a pair of pages, use this option to see the pages presented side by side in Acrobat. As with the Single Page mode, other pages that go before or fall after the spread aren’t visible — only the one pair of pages is visible onscreen, regardless of the magnification or scrolling.

Two-Page Scrolling: If you have a document with many pages containing text or pictures on their adjoining pages, you can use this mode to scroll from one pair of visible pages to the next. When the Two-Up Scrolling view is selected, you can see adjoining page spreads. This option is identical to the Two-Page view, but it also shows pages above or below the spread you’re presently viewing.

If you have pages where images or text goes across pages, the Two-Page View is useful. When displaying a magazine or catalog, the two-page pairs often display incorrectly. For example, a magazine will display the cover (page 1) and page 2 together, instead of displaying the cover on its own and then pages 2 and 3 together. To correct this, choose View⇒Page Display⇒Show Cover Page in TwoPage View. Additionally, the default option is for Acrobat to display a space between pages that are displayed together in the Two-Up mode. You can replace the space with a dotted line to divide the adjoining pages by choosing View⇒Page Display⇒Show Gaps Between Pages.

Additional viewing options

Acrobat has some additional options for changing your document display:

Full Screen mode (View⇒Full Screen Mode): Use the Full Screen mode if you’d like to hide all menus, toolbars, and other parts of the Acrobat interface. This option is useful if you want to focus on the document being displayed, not the program being used to view it. Use this mode, for example, when you’ve converted a PowerPoint file to a PDF document and want to deliver the presentation with Acrobat. If you’re viewing a document in the Full Screen mode, press the Esc key to return to the regular viewing mode.

When using the Full Screen mode, you can select Edit⇒Preferences and choose Full Screen to define attributes that change the way all files display when using the Full Screen mode. You can set the display to advance automatically from one page to the next at a certain interval, choose from many page transition types, and define the background color.

You can set a document to automatically open in Full Screen mode. To do so, choose File⇒Properties and then select the Open in Full Screen mode check box in the Initial View panel of the Document Properties dialog box.

Read mode (View⇒Read Mode): The many toolbars and buttons of Acrobat can get in the way of the document you want to review. Use Read mode to temporarily hide all the toolbars and buttons, making it easier to focus on the content of the PDF file.

Navigation panels

Acrobat offers a variety of panels that are helpful when navigating through PDF documents. The navigation panels appear along the left side of your Document window as small icons. Click an icon to make its panel visible. For example, click the Pages icon to display thumbnail-size representations of each page.

In the Page Thumbnails panel, click a thumbnail page to display that page in the Document window. There are 11 panels: Articles, Attachments, Bookmarks, Content, Destinations, Layers, Model Tree, Order, Page Thumbnails, Signatures, and Tags. You can access any of these by choosing View⇒Show/Hide⇒Navigation Panes.

Many panels have more advanced uses that are covered in later chapters of this minibook. Here, we provide you with a brief understanding of how you can use the Page Thumbnails panel to more easily navigate through a PDF document. Follow these steps:

1. Make sure that the Page Thumbnails panel is visible by clicking its panel icon.

2. In the Page Thumbnails panel, click any page thumbnail to navigate directly to that page.

A border appears around the selected page, and a box within the Page Thumbnails panel indicates what portion of the page is being viewed in the Document window.

You can click the black square icon in the bottom-right corner of the small box in the Page Thumbnails panel and drag diagonally upward to increase the magnification on the section of the page contained within the box. Alternatively, make the box larger by clicking and dragging down and out to expand the size of the area being viewed. Changing the size of the black box displayed on the page in the Page Thumbnails panel changes the area being viewed as well as the amount it’s magnified.